10 Rules From The Incompetent Educational Leader's Handbook

10 Rules For Stifling Change

1. Regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it is new and because it is from below.

2. Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures.

3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals.

4. Treat problems as a sign of failure.

5. Express your criticisms freely and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.

6. Control everything carefully. Count anything that can be counted, frequently.

7. Make sure that any request for information is fully justified and that it isn't distributed too freely (you don't want data to fall into the wrong hands).

8. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps people on their toes)

9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off or move people around.

10. Never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

From Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Comments

[roadturn]

Beautiful. Did you read my school's secret handbook for administrators?

[Rob Jacobs]

Is that a post on your blog or a book?

[Michael Sporer]

Sadly, too much of that goes on at schools. I'm big on making mundane things like ordering supplies as simple as possible for teachers. They need to spend less time on that and more face time with students. I work at a career school, so supplies are a gigantic part of the work. We work at developing solutions for teachers, not more roadblocks.